Switchboard

Guides / Hotkeys

Bind a hotkey

Hover the device card or profile pill, click its little keycap badge, then press the combination you want. It works from anywhere, including inside a fullscreen game.

There's no settings screen — the binding lives on the thing it presses

Switchboard has no options dialog, so there's nowhere to hide a list of keyboard shortcuts. Instead, a hotkey is set on the control it's a shortcut for: the card for the device, the pill for the profile.

  1. Open the flyout and hover the device or profile you want.
  2. Click the small keycap badge that appears on it.
  3. Press your combination. It's saved immediately.
A device card with its keycap badge reading 'press keys', waiting for input.
Waiting for a key. Press Escape to cancel, or Delete to clear the binding.

Once bound, the badge shows the combination:

A microphone card showing a keycap badge reading Alt+F2.
Alt+F2 now switches to this microphone from anywhere.

What ships already bound

You can rebind or remove any of them the same way. Deleting them all is respected — they don't come back on the next launch.

A combination needs a modifier

You can't bind a bare letter. A global hotkey takes that key away from every other program on your PC, so P on its own would break typing everywhere. Use Ctrl, Alt, Shift or Win with it. The one exception is F13–F24, which nothing else uses — handy if your keyboard software can send them.

If the badge looks faded

That means Windows refused the combination, which almost always means another program already owns it. Nothing is broken; the key just belongs to something else. Pick a different one, or close whatever has claimed it.

Switchboard shows this rather than hiding it, because the alternative is a shortcut that silently does nothing and no way to find out why.

How you know it worked

A hotkey is pressed with the flyout shut, usually over a game, so there's nothing on screen to confirm it. A small pill appears near your tray naming what changed, then fades.

A small dark pill reading 'EMBERTON III — Output'.
It never takes focus, so it can't pull you out of a game.

If a switch doesn't take — which Windows very occasionally refuses — the pill says so instead of naming the device.

Where they're stored

%APPDATA%\Switchboard\hotkeys.json. Editing it by hand is supported.